Bertie's Guide to Life and Mothers

by Alexander McCall Smith

  26. Angus Lordie Meets Dr. Macgregor

  Angus did not have long to wait in the waiting room before Dr. Macgregor appeared at the doorway asking him to come in. Entering the psychiatrist’s consulting room, he was invited to take a seat on the other side of the doctor’s desk.

  “No couch,” he remarked, as he sat down.

  Dr. Macgregor smiled. “I have a couch at home,” he said. “From which I watch television. Not that there’s anything remotely worth watching these days.”

  “The dumbing down of the culture,” said Angus.

  “Exactly,” said Dr. Macgregor. “And that brief exchange between us establishes exactly who we are, wouldn’t you say?”

  Angus relaxed. He had taken to Dr. Macgregor immediately. “Yes, it does, I suppose. To say that one doesn’t watch television is a real statement these days, isn’t it?”

  “It certainly is,” agreed Dr. Macgregor. “It means that one is, to an extent, alienated from the common herd.” He paused. “Mind you, to use the expression ‘common herd’ in itself reveals a great deal.” He looked at the letter before him, the single piece of paper in the file. “Your GP doesn’t say a great deal about you in his referral letter. Perhaps you would tell me a little bit about yourself before we get on to the somnambulism issue.”

  Angus sat back in his chair. “There’s not much to say, really.”

  Dr. Macgregor interrupted him. “But my dear Mr. Lordie, there is a great deal to say about everyone—even the least of men. Everybody has the most fascinating story, you know. Everyone.”

  Angus looked doubtful. “Are you sure? Aren’t there some frightfully dull people around?” As he spoke, he thought of poor Ramsey Dunbarton, WS, the Edinburgh lawyer whose sole distinction—indeed the highlight of his life—had been to play the Duke of Plaza-Toro in the Church Hill Theatre production of The Gondoliers. He had been terribly dull, poor man.

  Dr. Macgregor did not agree. “Even an apparently dull story can be fascinating,” he said. “The tiny details—the tedious things—have a certain grandeur to them, I find. And they also reveal the reasons for why we are what we are. So nothing is really unimportant.”

  Angus shrugged. “In that case, here goes. I was born in Perthshire. I went to school there at a place called Glenalmond.”

  Dr. Macgregor made a note on a pad of paper beside the file. “Glenalmond. An interesting place. I went to their prize-giving day a couple of years ago, you know. The daughter of some friends was leaving school that year and they invited me to go up there with them. It was a rather moving occasion.”

  “They can be,” said Angus.

  “Well this one most certainly was,” continued Dr. Macgregor. “We had a picnic lunch out on the grass after we had sat through the actual prize-giving and the address, and then we went off to the quad and listened to the pipe band. That was the end of the day, and I watched the pupils saying goodbye to one another. Do you know something? They were in tears. Boys and girls—all in tears, embracing one another, saying goodbye to their friends. I must admit I had a lump in my throat too. It was very affecting. And it made me realise how happy a school it must be for the pupils to feel that way.”

  Angus was silent. He remembered his last day at Glenalmond. It was just for boys in those days, and they had not cried; girls had made it possible for boys to cry. He had shaken hands with all the others in his year and had thought that he would never again have such a strong experience of friendship and belonging. And then he had been driven by his parents down the long drive into the outside world and his future, and had looked back, just once, to catch a glimpse of the buildings in which he had been so happy. And after that, everything had been harder, somehow, and less innocent, less hopeful.

  “So, anyway,” Angus continued, “I then went to the Edinburgh College of Art. I studied under Robin Philipson, just before he retired, and then I became a portrait painter. That’s more or less it. Family? I have a dog—a rather remarkable creature called Cyril—and recently I got married. It’s a late marriage, but I count myself very fortunate in having found a wonderful person, Domenica Macdonald. She’s a cultural anthropologist—quite well known in her field. We live in Scotland Street.”

  “And …” said Dr. Macgregor.

  “And it appears that I’ve been sleepwalking,” Angus supplied. “Hence my presence here.”

  Dr. Macgregor nodded. “Interesting. May I ask: did you have any sleep-related issues when you were a boy? Any sleepwalking, night terrors, anything of the sort?”

  Angus shook his head. “Nobody said anything about it, if I did. I used to have nightmares, though. I had quite bad nightmares for a while when I was at art college. I used to wake up shouting. My flatmates complained. I lived in a flat behind the King’s Theatre.”

  Dr. Macgregor made another note. “Do you recall the subject of the nightmares? Do you remember what you shouted?”

  “No,” said Angus. “But they told me. They said that I shouted out: ‘They’re going to stop teaching people how to draw!’ Very strange.”

  “And prescient too,” said Dr. Macgregor. “A typical anxiety dream. We all have them. A lot of people dream about being out in public with no clothes on. Some people dream that they’re writing an examination in ancient Greek or mathematics or whatever, and they have no knowledge of the subject. Anxiety dreams are almost universal.”

  “So not being taught how to draw is what you’d expect an artist to dream about?” asked Angus.

  “A real artist, yes,” said Dr. Macgregor. “But tell me: apart from those nightmares, have your sleep patterns been reasonably normal? Have you been getting your eight hours or so?”

  Angus nodded. “I sleep quite well. I never have any trouble getting to sleep, and I rarely wake up in the middle of the night.”

  Dr. Macgregor made a further note on his pad. “Well, Mr. Lordie, I suspect that these episodes of somnambulism are relatively minor things—they are what we call a parasomnia, but nothing too worrying. There’s been no evidence of violence or aggression during the episodes your wife has witnessed, has there?”

  “Not as far as I know,” said Angus. He looked enquiringly at the doctor. “Can somnambulists be violent?”

  “Oh yes,” said Dr. Macgregor. “Let me tell you about one or two cases that’ll make your hair stand on end.” He corrected himself quickly. “Not that I want to make your hair stand on end, of course.”

  27. Interesting Somnambulism Cases

  Dr. Macgregor would not normally have allowed himself such an excursus with a patient, but he felt an essential rapport with Angus and so he spoke quite freely.

  “The first thing I should say is this,” he began. “The overwhelming majority of cases of somnambulistic activity give no cause for alarm. Sleepwalking is, in fact, quite common in childhood and it’s something that people grow out of, rather like an appreciation of pop music—Abba, for instance—or any other childish aberration. But sometimes somnambulism continues into later life, or indeed first appears later on—as I suspect is the case with you. But whenever it first manifests itself, it tends to be pretty insignificant, and nothing needs to be done. However …” He looked at Angus cautiously. “However, there are cases—and I’m not sure if I should be bringing these up, as I don’t want to alarm you.”

  “Too late,” said Angus.

  Dr. Macgregor smiled. “Yes, perhaps it is. Well, let me tell you about a couple of cases I know about—one of which I’ve had some personal involvement with. A couple of these cases are Scottish, interestingly enough—one of them quite a well-known one among the lawyers. That was the Simon Fraser case, back in the nineteenth century.”

  The psychiatrist picked up his pen and doodled with it as he spoke, describing small arcs and circles on the pad in front of him.

  “Simon Fraser killed his young son while he was, by all accounts, fast asleep. Fortunately for him, he did this just at the time that forensic psychiatry was getting going in Scotland—we were pretty much at t
he vanguard of it in those days—and there was some enlightened medical opinion available at his trial. He was dealt with humanely and allowed off as long as he promised to sleep in a locked room from then on—which he did. The alternative, of course, in those days would have been the end of a rope—so poor Mr. Fraser was indeed fortunate.

  “Then, much more recently—only a few decades ago—there was a curious case written up in the medical literature. A teenage boy in Edinburgh attacked his cousin at night with a knife and injured her. Fortunately, not too badly, but it was a knife attack and the authorities had to do something about it. The boy had a perfectly good relationship with the cousin—there was no reason for him to do what he did, and it was out of character too. It looked as if he had done it in his sleep. Again a humane result was achieved, as he was not convicted. Which goes to show that the law can be sympathetic when there’s good supporting medical evidence.”

  Angus shifted in his seat. There but for the grace of God, he thought …

  “But listen to this,” Dr. Macgregor went on. “The really astonishing case is a Canadian one. I had some involvement in that as I was one of the experts to whom the papers in the case were sent by the defence for comment. They consulted psychiatrists in a number of countries, as it was a rather important case. A man in Toronto was sitting about in his apartment. He had a couple of beers—nothing much—and then dropped off to sleep on the couch. Later that night he got up, went down to his car and drove quite a few miles—over twelve, I think—to his parents-in-law’s place, negotiating, on the way, quite a few traffic lights. All of this, we were told, was done while he was sound asleep. Then he got out of the car, went into the parental-in-law apartment, and proceeded to attack his mother-in-law with a tyre lever. Psychiatric evidence was produced at the trial to the effect that all this was somnambulistic. The result was that he was acquitted.”

  Angus raised an eyebrow. “I suppose they had no alternative,” he said. “The things you do in your sleep aren’t voluntary, are they? You can’t be blamed for things you don’t intend to do.”

  “Indeed you can’t,” agreed Dr. Macgregor. “If you tap my knee and in reflex action my foot comes up and kicks you, that’s automatism. I shouldn’t be held responsible for the kick.”

  “No, you shouldn’t,” said Angus firmly. As a somnambulist, he felt that perhaps he had an interest in asserting the principle of non-responsibility for such acts.

  “However, there is a public safety issue,” said Dr. Macgregor, “and that means that the law must have one or two tricks up its sleeve to ensure that dangerous somnambulists don’t go round attacking their mothers-in-law. And there’s another thing. There was a fascinating study in Montreal some years back that shows that even when we are asleep there are certain inhibitory mechanisms operating in the brain. So things done in the sleeping state might just be the object of moral evaluation.”

  Angus looked at him expectantly. “Yes?”

  “There was a woman in Montreal,” Dr. Macgregor said, “who was obese. Now there are undoubtedly many women in Montreal who are obese, but this woman had an additional problem: she was a somnambulistic fridge-raider. She used to sleepwalk down to the fridge and tuck into various fattening snacks. And she had another problem: fear of snakes—ophidiophobia, to give it its full name. And this gave the doctors a chance to do a rather interesting experiment.”

  Angus sat at the edge of his seat. “What happened?” he asked.

  “They got her each night to put a large rubber snake on the fridge,” he said. “She did this just before she went to bed at night, and, would you believe it, it stopped her somnambulistic snacking—she was too frightened to go near the fridge.”

  “Although she was asleep? So she was frightened in her sleep?”

  “Yes,” said Dr. Macgregor. “But then one night she forgot to put the snake in position—and she somnambulistically snacked that particular night. So that shows …”

  “That we are aware of things while we are asleep?”

  “Yes. And it means that somnambulistic acts are influenced by thoughts of consequences and implications.”

  “Heavens!” said Angus, and thought: michty me!

  28. Birthday Presents

  Bertie had stayed awake much longer than usual on the night before his birthday. It was his last night, he reminded himself, of being six. His seventh year, it seemed to him, had lasted a remarkably long time and there were points at which he frankly wondered whether he would ever turn seven. But now it was the night before his birthday, and barring some cosmic disaster, the advent of some unexpected black hole into which the earth might be sucked, with the attendant reversal or suspension of time, in a very few hours he would be waking up to a world in which he was numbered among the seven-year-olds.

  There was much to think about as he lay in bed waiting for sleep to embrace him. There was his party—that was to take place on a date yet to be fixed; there were the inscriptions in his books that would need to be changed (they currently read Bertie Pollock (6) and that would need to be changed to Bertie Pollock (7) as soon as possible); and of course there was the important question of presents. Bertie had spent some time calculating how many presents he might reasonably expect to receive. There would be his big present from his mother and father; there would be a present bought by his parents on behalf of his baby brother, Ulysses; there would be a present from his friend Ranald Braveheart Macpherson; and possibly a present from Olive. In due course, when his party took place he could expect as many presents as there were guests, but there were a certain number of imponderables in that respect that made any specific calculation a little difficult. Tofu always spoke about giving presents but almost always came up with some excuse for not doing so. And as for Larch, who was one of the worrying, uninvited guests on the party list, he tended to take presents from parties rather than bring them. Ranald, however, could be counted on to give a generous present. He bought these himself, using money that he was able to remove from his father’s safe now that he had worked out the combination. “It’s OK with my dad,” Ranald had said. “He has bags of money in that safe, Bertie—you should come and look at it some day. He doesn’t mind.”

  Bertie eventually drifted off to sleep and at six o’clock the next morning woke up a seven-year-old. When his eyes first opened on the important morning, he lay quite still, savouring the sheer pleasure of being seven. It was different; it most definitely was. He felt mature, responsible, filled with a sort of juvenile gravitas.

  Getting out of bed, he dressed quickly and made his way into his parents’ room. His mother was already awake, and was sitting up in bed reading.

  “Well, Bertie,” she said as he came into the room. “Happy birthday, darling!”

  Bertie went to his mother’s side and allowed her to give him a birthday kiss. From inside the shower in the adjoining bathroom, he heard his father calling out, “Happy birthday, old fellow!”

  “How does it feel to be seven?” asked Irene. “Different?”

  Bertie nodded gravely. “I feel a bit more grown-up, Mummy,” he said. “I feel a bit more capable of making my own decisions.”

  Irene smiled. “So you should, Bertie. However, we don’t want to run before we can walk, do we? Seven is still quite young, you know.”

  “But now that I’m seven can’t I decide for myself what I want to do, Mummy?”

  Irene looked at him cautiously. “Decide what sort of thing, carissimo?”

  “Well, for example: yoga. Can’t I decide not to go to yoga now?”

  Irene laughed. “Of course not, Bertie. Yoga’s fun! You love yoga.”

  “I don’t,” said Bertie. “I think it’s silly twisting yourself like that. You could break your back doing yoga.”

  “How amusing,” said Irene. “No, Bertie, we mustn’t give up on our yoga just yet.”

  There was a brief silence, interrupted by Stuart’s coming back into the room, wearing his tartan dressing-gown.

  “Well done
, wee chap,” he said, tousling Bertie’s hair. “Seven! What a thought!”

  “Is it time for presents yet?” asked Bertie politely.

  Irene nodded, and reached for two wrapped parcels by the side of her bed. “Which would you like first, Bertie? Ulysses’ present, or the present from Mummy and Daddy?”

  Bertie looked uncertain, but after a moment or two opted to receive the present from Ulysses.

  “Here we are,” said Irene, handing Bertie a large rectangular parcel. “Open it up, Bertie, and let’s see what little Ulysses has bought you.”

  Bertie fumbled with the wrapping paper. A box was revealed. He turned it over so that he could read the inscription: Junior UN Peacekeeping Kit.

  Bertie looked at his mother.

  “Well, carissimo, open it up and tell us what you find inside.”

  He took off the lid. Inside was an entire set of items enabling children to play UN peacekeepers. On the front of the book of instructions was the following text: A fine gift for those who wish to avoid militaristic play (Cowboys and Indians, soldiers, etc.). Children become UN peacekeepers with these handy blue UN armbands, pacification leaflets, and pretend maps. Hours of constructive fun for children aged 5 to 10. No small parts.

  “Thank you,” said Bertie quietly. He had noticed that there was no Swiss Army penknife included.

  “And now this is from Mummy and Daddy,” said Irene, handing him a smaller box wrapped in bright red paper.